The look from the 1930s was a strong part, inspired by Donald Sheffield Ferguson, the first black medical student at Kansas University.

"He fought tooth and nail to even get in the program and to even stay. To see in the '30s, even before what we think of as the civil rights movement, to have black folks who were working really hard to achieve advanced medical degrees," Chan explains.

The look from the '40s recognizes how many black men served in World War II.

"The conk is chemically processed hair, so we didn't formally do that to Lester, the model, but we tried to recreate it," Chan says. "In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, there is a chapter dedicated to him getting his first conk. He writes about how much he wanted to be white, and to have white hair, and adopt a white physiology, and yet the pain was so unbearable that it inaugurated for him a racial consciousness. About colonial mentality, about wanting to be white, about being a black body in a white world."

The inspiration for the black beret look in the '60s was Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party.

In the present day, the look is a throwback reference to the flat top, but it's really about the fade and the verticality of the hair.

"Yet we also see plenty of white boys walking around with this sort of thing. Macklemore has this hair, too. It's interesting," says Chan. "In a century, we have white men going to black-owned barber shops to get their hair done because it's part of a longer Southern tradition. One thing 100 Years of Beauty has always tried to do is to show how the past informs the present."

For more on the looks, you can watch the video about the research behind the video below.